The Drop Dead Dream
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day three hundred and ninety-five:  rmm 6/8  The memories she holds are few and far in between, but they could save her.


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 18th cycle. Now cycle 19!_

_**READ MY MIND SET** - __I've been wanting to do something like this, in some way, for a while now. Listening to the song "Read My Mind" by the Killers, there were a set of lines I thought might be good for inspiration, so...here we are! There will be EIGHT, four in the first week of this cycle, four in the third/last.  
_**TODAY:** _"The Drop Dead Dream"_  


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**"The Drop Dead Dream"  
April**

She never saw any kind of appeal in reminiscing… 'The good old days…' Those were blurry at best, for the most part, so why even go there. She knew she had talent like they wouldn't see coming, and she was their star… To them 'April Rhodes' was a legend, for that sense of talent.

These days she felt a lot more like 'April Rhodes' was a legend, the kind some had heard of, others hadn't, and no one knew for sure to have ever existed. A lot of times it didn't really bother her… all of those because she was too drunk to care, too busy having fun. The other times though… she'd be sober, in just about every sense of the word, and she'd wonder how she'd gotten to where she was now, which was simply nowhere.

It was on one of those days that she inexplicably opened herself to that dreaded nostalgia. She'd found the video, tucked inside an old bag of things… She had some sentimental values, though this was one she'd carried from place to place without ever opening. Woken by a splitting headache, she'd dragged her feet and nearly tripped on the bag, turned over and half-emptied on her living room/kitchen floor. She groaned and bent over to pick it up, and that was when the tape came tumbling out.

Looking at it, right there on the floor, it didn't take long before she'd identified it… There was her neat teenaged handwriting on the box, complete with hearts-in-red dotting the I's. She'd picked it up and left it on a counter before getting something for her head and returning to bed and falling asleep again for a few hours.

She woke up then, headache free and deeply sobered… starving. She'd gone to the kitchen, looking for the quickest answer to a 2pm breakfast. And then she'd seen it, like it was the first time… The tape on the counter. At first she'd shrugged at it, her usual answer to the past, the things she'd lost, the things she couldn't get back… Heaven knew she had tried, and tried again.

But then as she sat, tending to her massive hunger, there was the tape… the little red hearts she'd draw out with such attention… Nowadays her signature was so lifeless, boring… hard to read, if she was drunk or high… She stared at those perfect little hearts, and finally she had to do it, she had to look at what was on that tape. It was a good thing she still had the machine for it.

She sat there, her robe gathered around herself as she looked at the screen, waiting… She wasn't even sure what performance she'd find on there… All it said was 'Memories 1992.' Of course, because where else would they be; her brain and memories were not exactly the best of friends.

It wasn't a show, not a competition… It was Glee Club. There she stood, young April Rhodes, around her five of her fellow club members… Bryan Ryan, Donovan Wells, Marcus Finley, and the twins, Leigh & Mara O'Donnell. There were six of them, three pairs, and yet she stood out like always.

There was so much joy in her face, her eyes… such a smile… Seeing it, she could recognize it was her, even if it had been years, but… looking at this, it was like… she'd been going about, believing she was April Rhodes, but now she was finding this wasn't true. She was a poor copy, and this girl on the screen she was the genuine article… She'd just been trying to be her for all these years.

There was no going back, to being that girl dancing and singing there on that screen. Too much had happened, and no amount of pills or drinks would make that go away… They'd only make it worse. She'd tried to turn things around, more than once. In some cases she even had people there, who believed in her enough to try and back her up in these efforts… But she'd let them down every time, and she also knew she'd let herself down.

She could be so much, she knew she could, she saw it right there on that screen. She saw it in people's eyes when they watched her sing. All this talent, and she just thought everything would work out for her for that reason alone, that it would just come and be handed to her. It just went to show how wrong she'd been; she had let her own downfall happen to her.

She hadn't seen how bad it could be, not until she'd been reunited with Will Schuester… She hadn't remembered him, still didn't, but she really wished she did. Things might have been so different if she had known him and recalled him. After he'd brought her back into that room, where she'd spent so much time as McKinley's star… That's when it all came into focus, and for a while after that she tried to blur it again, because she couldn't stand to look.

She'd try again, she had to… for her sake and Will Schuester's trust. It was going to be hard, she knew, and maybe she'd fail again. But then she'd just have to take another go. She'd doubt herself; she'd want to fall back on old habits… But she had this now, this memory outside of herself with the little red hearts, to remind her of who she was.

THE END

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[A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, story alert won't get you anything! ;)]


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